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Student Design, Development, and Operations of Small Satellites At Session 3202 Student Design, Development and Operations of Small Satellites at the United States Air Force Academy Kenneth E. Siegenthaler, Jerry J. Sellers, David J. Richie, and Timothy J. Lawrence Department of Astronautics United States Air Force Academy Abstract The FalconSAT program is a unique, dynamic small-satellite research program that serves as a capstone course for Astronautical Engineering majors at the United States Air Force Academy. The goal of the program is to give students the opportunity to “learn space by doing space.” The program results in a satellite launched into space every two to three years. It is conducted in the same manner required of any civilian company delivering a satellite for a NASA/Air Force launch. In addition to the design and construction of the satellites, students must meet all of the Department of Defense (DoD) milestones, including preparing and briefing the Alternative Systems Review (ASR), Preliminary Design Review (PDR), Critical Design Review (CDR), and Product Acceptance Demonstration (PAD). These reviews are given to and evaluated by members of the civilian aerospace community and scientists and engineers from U.S. Air Force space organizations outside of the Academy. Each student is required to become familiar with the functioning of the payload and all of the subsystems. The average student participates in design, clean-room construction, shake and bake-out testing, ground station operations, program management, and presents review briefings during the two-semester course. The students also prepare and brief the proposed experimental payload briefings to the DoD Space Experiments Review Board (SERB), competing on a level playing field with all of the other civilian and military proposals. This paper discusses the current status of the FalconSAT program, the challenges of an almost complete turnover of personnel every year, and the dynamics of managing the design, construction, and flying of a satellite every two to three years by a completely student team. Since this program is conducted in the same manner as a typical science and engineering program, students from other academic departments also participate in the program. The program has been augmented by the participation of students from six different academic departments. The addition of this multidisciplinary real-world atmosphere adds an extra dimension of realism to the program. This paper discusses the 9.1128.1 Page various solutions the Academy has devised to address the many challenges of conducting a successful program in a highly constrained undergraduate environment. “Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright À2004, American Society for Engineering Education” I. Introduction The FalconSAT program at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) gives undergraduate students a chance to “Learn Space by Doing Space” through a capstone course in the Astronautics Department. This program allows cadets to gain real-world experience with satellite system design, assembly, integration, testing, and operations within the context of a two-semester engineering course. Another goal of the program is to provide a useful platform for Air Force and Department of Defense (DoD) space experiments. Through FalconSAT participation, cadets are given a hands-on opportunity to apply the tools developed in a classroom to a real program, ideally preparing them for the situations they may encounter as officers and as engineers after graduation. Just as any space mission is multi-disciplinary, select students from the Management, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Physics Departments; participate with the Astronautical Engineering majors in the program. This program uses an evolutionary design approach in which cadets employ or refine cutting- edge technologies and procedures developed by their predecessors. Lessons learned are then captured and help USAFA build a catalog of technical procedures for future missions. Because there is almost a 100% turnover every year, documentation is crucial to the success of the program[1]. After a brief history of the program, this paper will discuss the approach used to conduct a successful program, using only mentored undergraduate students to design, develop and operate small satellites of nano-satellite and micro-satellite size. All of these satellites have Air Force and DoD space experiments as their mission. II. Background The USAF Academy started experimenting with small satellites via cadet-built prototypes that were “launched” on high altitude balloons. These projects gave the students immediate, hands-on experience and allowed the Astronautics Department to gradually evolve the curriculum to accommodate increasingly more ambitious space projects. This initial development culminated in the launch of FalconGold in October 1997. FalconGold was a 15 Kg fixed, secondary payload on an Atlas-Centaur launch vehicle. The mission of FalconGold was to determine whether GPS signals could be detected above the GPS constellation. FalconGold relayed GPS data for 15 days prior to battery depletion. Successful operations and data recovery from FalconGold concluded that GPS signals could be used for orbit determination, even beyond the altitude of the GPS constellation[2]. With the space launch of FalconGold, the groundwork was in place to continue the program exclusively with space launched satellites[3]. The Academy’s first “free-flyer” satellite, FalconSAT-1 (FS-1), was a 52 Kg satellite launched on January 14, 2000 aboard the first Minotaur launch vehicle (a modified Minuteman II ICBM) along with several other university-built micro-satellites. FS-1 Page 9.1128.2 Page flew the DoD-supported Charging Hazards and Wake Studies—Long Duration (CHAWS-LD) experiment which was designed to measure electric potential created by a “Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright À2004, American Society for Engineering Education” spacecraft’s wake to examine how charging varies throughout an orbit. The CHAWS-LD sensor was designed to assess the hazards for spacecraft operations in the wake of larger bodies. Unfortunately, a power system problem became apparent soon after deployment. Despite repeated attempts to recover the spacecraft by the cadet-faculty operations team, the mission was declared a loss after only one month [3]. Although it was considered a technical failure, FS-1 represented an academic success for the program because cadets participated from “cradle to grave” in a real-world mission with an all too real-world outcome. Cadets designed and built FS-1’s payload and subsystems, which were integral in the mission operations from devising operations plans to participating in the launch campaign. Cadets also manned the Academy’s ground station during overhead passes of a satellite not operating under normal conditions. Cadets involved with trouble-shooting the anomalies soon after deployment certainly gained deep insight into system functions and operations[3]. III. A More Standardized Program The lessons learned from FS-1 motivated a significant structural change to the program, with the intention of building a program first and a satellite second. Thus, the new approach was to focus on building up infrastructure, including design and development tools that can serve as a firm foundation to allow the design to evolve steadily over the course of several missions. The FS-2 design effort was aimed at developing a flexible platform that can be readily adapted and enhanced to meet future payload requirements and secondary launch opportunities[1]. Part of this new approach was a major effort to bound the problem faced by the students. To do this, the program has leveraged research at the Surrey Space Center at the University of Surrey, UK. In June 2000, engineers there launched the first SNAPSat satellite, a 6.5 kg, highly functional, spacecraft with 5 imaging cameras, 3-axis attitude control and a propulsion system [4]. SNAPSat represents the culmination of research into open spacecraft architectures. By buying into this SNAPSat architecture, the Academy program has achieved an “out-of-the-box” solution for several critical subsystems; including power, communications and, most important, data handling [3]. Using one set of SNAP hardware, the FS-1 Avionics Simulation Testbed (FAST) was established in Fall 2000. FAST provides both a long-term facility for cadets to gain hands-on experience with spacecraft hardware and software, as well as overall program risk reduction by providing a facility for subsystem, software, and operational procedures development and testing. While the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware such as SNAP has eased the design problem in many respects, considerable effort still remains in the areas of payload design and development, structures, attitude control, thermal control, solar panels, testing and operations—more than enough to challenge even the most ambitious undergraduate students[3]. 9.1128.3 Page A concerted effort was also made to involve cadets from a variety of departments, not just Astronautics, to expand the knowledge base of participants and give every cadet, “Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright À2004, American Society for Engineering Education” regardless of their major, an opportunity to contribute to the program. This approach
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